Mary Halvorson has a psychiatrist friend who has an interesting take on her. “You look normal, and you’re this normal person,” he once told the acclaimed American jazz guitarist and composer. “But you kind of understand the not normal, and you’re able to go there, but you always know how to come back.”
Halvorson laughs at the observation. “I think he meant that I have a completely crazy side, but I don’t stay there – there’s another side of me that reins it in,” she says, from her apartment in Brooklyn.
“And my friend’s comment is a lot better than an astrologer I saw recently. She had never met me before, but she looked at my chart and also said, ‘You look normal.’ And then she added, ‘But you’re the one that might secretly blow up the airplane!’”
The latter remark may sound outlandish, and Halvorson is at pains to stress, to the US department of homeland security at least, that she categorically has no such plans. But you only have to listen to her wildly original guitar playing and compellingly multilayered compositions to recognise these contradictions as ideal metaphors for her music.
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Her natural look and self-contained demeanour may give her the feel of a modern folk musician, yet she can shred and distort like a death-metal guitarist. Even her most seemingly straight-ahead solos are often subverted by the warped and woozy tones she generates from her oversized hollow-body guitar and judicious use of effects pedals.
As the cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum once put it, referencing one of jazz guitar’s mainstream masters, Halvorson’s singular style is something like “Jim Hall on acid”.
Her instantly recognisable compositions share a similar duality and tension. Deftly dancing between such opposing forces as complexity and simplicity, tonality and dissonance, Halvorson’s music, as the critic Nate Chinen has written, “is a precarious balance of precision and abandon”.
She has a deep love of melody, much of it jagged and jostling, and she writes thrilling arrangements, particularly for horns and strings. Yet her tunes almost always contain something curious and off-kilter, especially harmonically and rhythmically.
They feel like instant postmodern classics, brilliantly blending not only elements of avant-jazz, experimental rock, contemporary composition and chamber music but also, more generally – as Halvorson once said of the music of the idiosyncratic English singer and songwriter Robert Wyatt – “the weird with the beautiful”.
“I’m not trying to be weird, though, or to write something completely off the wall,” Halvorson says. “It’s just how I see things aesthetically. I like to take a composition somewhere slightly different, to create left turns and deviations so it has elements that are unexpected or surprising. That’s the kind of music I like, that I enjoy listening to.”
Irish audiences have previously experienced Halvorson’s irresistibly unorthodox approach in groups led by such fellow travellers as the saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and the drummer Tom Rainey. This month, the 45-year-old makes her long-overdue Irish debut as leader, bringing a new quartet, Canis Major, to the National Concert Hall.
Halvorson grew up in the town of Brookline, just outside Boston, a single child of parents from Scandinavian stock. Her father ran a landscape-architecture firm in Boston; her mother worked as a nurse at the healthcare service for Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There was a family tradition of both loving and playing music. “Well, my father is self-described as tone-deaf and got kicked out of his church choir,” she says, chuckling.
Halvorson is bright and charming, if somewhat inscrutable, and laughs easily. “But his dad could hear something on the radio and then reproduce it perfectly on the piano. And my mom sang in a choir and played some piano, and her mother played traditional Swedish music on accordion.”
Halvorson began classical violin lessons at the age of seven, but by 12 she had discovered Jimi Hendrix. There was an acoustic guitar at home, and she started teaching herself his songs. “I remember wanting to hit the strings hard, with a really thick pick,” she has said. “That kind of came out of nowhere.”
Soon after, her parents bought Halvorson a black-and-white Fender Stratocaster and she was on her way, quickly learning tunes by groups ranging from The Beatles to The Allman Brothers Band and The Smashing Pumpkins. Eventually, through her father’s record collection and her first guitar teacher at high school, Issi Rozen, Halvorson found her way to jazz.
I remember wanting to hit the strings hard, with a really thick pick. That kind of came out of nowhere
— Mary Halvorson
Her first jazz-guitar hero was the mainstream maestro Wes Montgomery, followed by the fusion-and-beyond virtuoso Pat Metheny, but by the time she was 18 she had gravitated, in characteristic Halvorson fashion, towards the English free-improvising iconoclast Derek Bailey. She also listened to avant-garde saxophonists such as Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
As a teenage guitar player with no female role models, she nonetheless found encouragement at home. “Both my parents were very hardworking, so I think I get my work ethic from them,” she says. “They were also very supportive when I later wanted to pursue a career in music – which can be a risky path. It was only afterwards that I found out they were terrified.”
It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. Halvorson attended summer jazz camps at such prestigious Boston institutions as Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory, where she experienced some prejudice. “That was a hurdle for me, because some people were condescending or didn’t take me seriously,” she says. “I was the only girl, and I was deathly shy and had no confidence, but some part of me wanted to prove them wrong.”
She enrolled at Wesleyan University in Connecticut to study biology, intending to become a research scientist, but in her first semester she took a couple of classes taught by one of creative music’s most distinguished composers and conceptualists, Anthony Braxton.
They proved transformative: soon after she switched to music, studying with Braxton and the experimental guitarist Joe Morris; in her third year she focused on jazz at the New School, in New York.
“Not only did Anthony and Joe drill into me the idea of finding my own thing, my own voice – a process that never stops – but they also exploded the notion of what music is, and could be: nothing was off-limits,” she says.
“I had no delusions about making a career in avant-garde music. But I asked myself, ‘Do you want this badly enough that you’re willing to work a full-time office job for the rest of your life to support it?’ Which, by the way, is what I did for the first five years I lived in New York. And the answer was yes.”
After moving to Brooklyn in 2002, Halvorson began to play in an impressively catholic range of contexts, from the ambitious open-form compositions of Braxton to the avant-rock duo People, with the drummer Kevin Shea, and a chamber-folk-jazz collaboration with the violist Jessica Pavone. For the latter two, she also sang and wrote enigmatic lyrics. She also began composing more and more, releasing her debut as leader, Dragon’s Head, in 2008; the album featured Halvorson in a venturesome trio with the bassist Jon Hébert and the drummer Ches Smith.
Since then her work has been characterised by its plurality and panoramic intent, moving from the shapeshifting solo-guitar recording Meltframe to highly interactive duos with the pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and the guitarist Bill Frisell, the agile collective trio Thumbscrew, and upwards through various state-of-the-art ensembles, the quintet Code Girl and the sextet Amaryllis being especially lauded high points.
She has also appeared on albums by leading women in creative music, including the cellist Tomeka Reid, the pianist Myra Melford and the late pedal-steel guitarist Susan Alcorn.
I like making music that doesn’t have to be just one thing
— Mary Halvorson
In 2019, Halvorson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called Genius Grant that at that time rewarded its recipients $625,000 over five years; two years later she signed to the wilfully eclectic and much-admired Nonesuch label, an association that only seems to have further expanded her diverse and visionary world.
Next month Nonesuch releases the absorbing and extravagantly titled Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings, a dream duo album with the star trumpeter (and labelmate) Ambrose Akinmusire.
Halvorson is a musician who has largely operated beyond taxonomy. How does she feel about the often thorny issue of genre? “I mean, I understand why people talk about it, because I guess you have to categorise an album somehow, both in the record store and as a means for describing and talking about it,” she says.
“All of my music involves improvisation, so that’s probably the thing that ties it in most with jazz. But, yeah, it doesn’t really matter to me what you call it or how you define it. I like being able to work in the in-between areas. I like making music that doesn’t have to be just one thing.”
Mary Halvorson: Canis Major is at the Studio at the National Concert Hall, in Dublin, as part of the Perspectives series, on Friday, May 15th. Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings is released by Nonesuch on Friday, June 12th
